How Do I Choose Between the Various Ways to do Threading in Delphi?

Question

It seems that I've finally got to implement some sort of threading into my Delphi 2009 program. If there were only one way to do it, I'd be off and running. But I see several possibilities.

Can anyone explain what's the difference between these and why I'd choose one over another.

1. The TThread class in Delphi

2. AsyncCalls by Andreas Hausladen

3. OmniThreadLibrary by Primoz Gabrijelcic (gabr)

4. ... any others?

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Edit:

I have just read an excellent article by Gabr in the March 2010 (No 10) issue of Blaise Pascal Magazine titled "Four Ways to Create a Thread". You do have to subscribe to gain content to the magazine, so by copyright, I can't reproduce anything substantial about it here.

In summary, Gabr describes the difference between using TThreads, direct Windows API calls, Andy's AsyncCalls, and his own OmniThreadLibrary. He does conclude at the end that:

"I'm not saying that you have to choose anything else than the classical Delphi way (TThread) but it is still good to be informed of options you have"

Mghie's answer is very thorough and suggests OmniThreadLibrary may be preferable. But I'm still interested in everyone's opinions about how I (or anyone) should choose their threading method for their application.

And you can add to the list:

. 4. Direct calls to the Windows API

. 5. Mischa Charrett's CSI Application Framework as suggested by LachlanG in his answer.

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Conclusion:

I'm probably going to go with OmniThreadLibrary. I like Gabr's work. I used his profiler GPProfile many years ago, and I'm currently using his GPStringHash which is actually part of OTL.

My only concern might be upgrading it to work with 64-bit or Unix/Mac processing once Embarcadero adds that functionality into Delphi.

Answer 1

TThread is a simple class that encapsulates a Windows thread. You make a descendant class with an Execute method that contains the code this thread should execute, create the thread and set it to run and the code executes.

AsyncCalls and OmniThreadLibrary are both libraries that build a higher-level concept on top of threads. They're about tasks, discrete pieces of work that you need to have execute asynchronously. You start the library, it sets up a task pool, a group of special threads whose job is to wait around until you have work for them, and then you pass the library a function pointer (or method pointer or anonymous method) containing the code that needs to be executed, and it executes it in one of the task pool threads and handles a lot of the the low-level details for you.

I haven't used either library all that much, so I can't really give you a comparison between the two. Try them out and see what they can do, and which one feels better to you.

Answer 2

There is another lesser known Delphi threading library, Misha Charrett's CSI Application Framework.

It's based around message passing rather than shared memory. The same message passing mechanism is used to communicate between threads running in the same process or in other processes so it's both a threading library and a distributed inter-process communication library.

There's a bit of a learning curve to get started but once you get going you don't have to worry about all the traditional threading issues such as deadlocks and synchronisation, the framework takes care of most of that for you.

Misha's been developing this for years and is still actively improving the framework and documentation all the time. He's always very responsive to support questions.

Answer 3

If you are not experienced with multi-threading you should probably not start with TThread, as it is but a thin layer over native threading. I consider it also to be a little rough around the edges; it has not evolved a lot since the introduction with Delphi 2, mostly changes to allow for Linux compatibility in the Kylix time frame, and to correct the more obvious defects (like fixing the broken MREW class, and finally deprecating Suspend() and Resume() in the latest Delphi version).

Using a simple thread wrapper class basically also causes the developer to focus on a level that is much too low. To make proper use of multiple CPU cores a focus on tasks instead of threads is better, because the partitioning of work with threads does not adapt well to changing requirements and environments - depending on the hardware and the other software running in parallel the optimum number of threads may vary greatly, even at different times on the same system. A library that you pass only chunks of work to, and which schedules them automatically to make best use of the available resources helps a lot in this regard.

AsyncCalls is a good first step to introduce threads into an application. If you have several areas in your program where a number of time-consuming steps need to be performed that are independent of each other, then you can simply execute them asynchronously by passing each of them to AsyncCalls. Even when you have only one such time-consuming action you can execute it asynchronously and simply show a progress UI in the VCL thread, optionally allowing for cancelling the action.

AsyncCalls is IMO not so good for background workers that stay around during the whole program runtime, and it may be impossible to use when some of the objects in your program have thread affinity (like database connections or OLE objects that may have a requirement that all calls happen in the same thread).

What you also need to be aware of is that these asynchronous actions are not of the "fire-and-forget" kind. Every overloaded AsyncCall() function returns an IAsyncCall interface pointer that you may need to keep a reference to if you want to avoid blocking. If you don't keep a reference, then the moment the ref count reaches zero the interface will be freed, which will cause the thread releasing the interface to wait for the asynchronous call to complete. This is something that you might see while debugging, when exiting the method that created the IAsyncCall may take a mysterious amount of time.

OTL is in my opinion the most versatile of your three options, and I would use it without a second thought. It can do everything TThread and AsyncCalls can do, plus much more. It has a sound design, which is high-level enough both to make life for the user easy, and to let a port to a Unixy system (while keeping most of the interface intact) look at least possible, if not easy. In the last months it has also started to acquire some high-level constructs for parallel work, highly recommended.

OTL has a few dozen samples too, which is important to get started. AsyncCalls has nothing but a few lines in comments, but then it is easy enough to understand due to its limited functionality (it does only one thing, but it does it well). TThread has only one sample, which hasn't really changed in 14 years and is mostly an example of how not to do things.

Whichever of the options you choose, no library will eliminate the need to understand threading basics. Having read a good book on these is a prerequisite to any successful coding. Proper locking for example is a requirement with all of them.

Answer 4

(sorry, I don't have enough points to comment so I'm putting this in as an answer rather than another vote for OTL)

I've used TThread, CSI and OmniThread (OTL). The two libraries both have non-trivial learning curves but are much more capable than TThread. My conclusion is that if you're going to do anything significant with threading you'll end up writing half of the library functionality anyway, so you might as well start with the working, debugged version someone else wrote. Both Misha and Gabr are better programmers than most of us, so odds are they've done a better job than we will.

I've looked at AsyncCalls but it didn't do enough of what I wanted. One thing it does have is a "Synchronize" function (missing from OTL) so if you're dependent on that you might go with AynscCalls purely for that. IMO using message passing is not hard enough to justify the nastiness of Synchronize, so buckle down and learn how to use messages.

Of the three I prefer OTL, largely because of the collection of examples but also because it's more self-contained. That's less of an issue if you're already using the JCL or you work in only one place, but I do a mix including contract work and selling clients on installing Misha's system is harder than the OTL, just because the OTL is ~20 files in one directory. That sounds silly, but it's important for many people.

With OTL the combination of searching the examples and source code for keywords, and asking questions in the forums works for me. I'm familiar with the traditional "offload CPU-intensive tasks" threading jobs, but right now I'm working on backgrounding a heap of database work which has much more "threads block waiting for DB" and less "CPU maxed out", and the OTL is working quite well for that. The main differences are that I can have 30+ threads running without the CPU maxing out, but stopping one is generally impossible.

Answer 5

There's a class wrapper for TThread on Stack Overflow

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